


Atropos

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Western, Breathplay, Dreams, Drugs, Epistolary, M/M, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 18:26:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12989922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: 1887, along the Old Spanish Trail. History, memory, fate, madness, old letters, an apparition, a curse.





	Atropos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peccadilloes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peccadilloes/gifts).



The condition was sleep apnea or so a doctor told him. “Ondine’s Curse.” It was exceedingly rare in males of his age and sometimes it was fatal but not much might be done except that he might marry a girl who would wake him if he stopped breathing. It was also exceedingly rare that a male of his age wouldn’t be married, though this went unaddressed by the doctor. Besides it was less rare for this country which made ghosts and/or godheads of men and women before too long. 

He thanked the doctor and went out into the street. The sun had dried the muck into ridged red cornices like a shrunken version of the cliffs which hung over the town even now spreading from themselves a grey stain that would shed no rain and move onward again toward the distant mountains. 

\--

In the shadow of the sun in the shack at the edge of the desert an apparition came in the door of his cottage and sat contemplatively at the edge of the bed. 

This piece of it he had not told the doctor. 

The apparition was very like the memory of the beloved face except wrong. Burnt by years. And the fine hat and coat were tatters. Like a ghost or an executioner it came sweeping in the door with the frigid and glass-brittle draft and the sounds of the night animals miles away across the endless blood-red country amplified and echoed into vicious screaming in the wind-smoothed stone. As some manifestation of this sound it came in the door and sat on the edge of the bed. The fire by now was embers. In its dim red light he was nearly awake but paralyzed by the treacly weight of his sleep like a pure drug. The hand reached from the sleeve emaciated and sometimes skinless in his imagination and when it rested where it had been wont to rest in the olden days it was chill as the grave. 

\--

He had forgotten, by the time he was living along the Old Spanish Trail, how they had met, or when; this was due perhaps to drink, otherwise to dope, otherwise to there being too much else in his head — maps of this world and others, names, places, histories, flora and fauna, works of literature, dreams — to catalog the undesirables anymore… it was as though when he had first come to live along the Colorado he had knelt by the river and pulled everything of note out of his mind through his ear and let it go into the rushing water. 

It was an always thing, he thought, when he was in a bad way. It possessed his mind. It tasted poison. It came to him now like this to kill and it was no wonder. He had asked for it in not so many words any number of times. 

The history could not be related in some unit of quantifying as base as years. When he had been more fond of drugs he had had some psychedelic explanation involving portents. His father had told him that, on the day of his birth, which was the same day as his mother’s death, his older brother, also by now gone the way of Lethe, had found a nest of dead hatchling ravens toward the back of the property. His father like many men haunted by the country had had a taste for symbols. Which it seemed perhaps like so much else unwilling had been inherited. 

\--

He was young when he left home. Perhaps he was fourteen. There had been some amorphous promise of work which of course has been a falsehood. Someone he trusted had asked, because he had a horse, if he wouldn’t mind just carrying this satchel from Kansas City to Denver. He had ridden along the vast flat with a wagon train at first but he left them one evening, frustrated by their slow pace. He rode at night and slept in the day in the cold shade of the scarce cottonwoods hugging the satchel. The world appeared as swaths of paint in a box made for a child: blue, green, yellow, grey, the shocking sunset, which evaded description, which caught in the blue-black sky in pockets for hours after dark, the lightning, which struck without rain, reaching across the firmament, pure white light, the crash that followed, like the voice of god, which had its own color… 

In Denver he was told in a saloon that the would-be recipient of the satchel was dead. Behind the establishment in an alley he opened the bag for the first time to find it was full of glass jars cushioned in calico fabric and containing a fine white powder. A working woman of the city came over and advised him that it was worth a killing. She also advised him against trying any. 

He rode alone south along the spine of the mountains toward Albuquerque. 

\--

He woke in the narrow bed choking for breath. The dawn which touched the window had dissolved the apparition which in the indistinct realm between sleep and consciousness had sealed its skeletal hand about his throat and applied pressure as if to a wound. 

He sat up. The fire had gone in the night and the air in the room was frigid against his skin which was burning. He buried his face in the crook of his elbow into the pitchy darkness. As ever he hated to touch himself for fear that it might make something true and yet as ever he did anyway. The desperation of breath unravelled. It took but three strokes of his hand before he came. The world washed clean. He lay down in the cold light but could not sleep again. The sickness came threading back into the world through the cracks and after awhile he had to get up and draw his water from the well and do all the nothing things around the homestead which diffused the endless mantra like a song being sung by angels or their opposite: _Do you recall who he was — who he is? What he’s done? Do you recall what you allowed?_

He recalled their first meeting occasionally in dreams of the undream which was history. They were very young then. He’d lost count of his age but thought he was seventeen. That was how old Sirius was and it seemed to mesh. This estimation would make it sometime in the year 1867. 

In the manner of many men who love or kill each other they had first seen one another in a crowded room. Their eyes met accidentally. He thought Sirius moved like one of those stalking marsh birds. He was drunk and his laughter was huge and he was idiotically beautiful. At first Remus thought the feeling was envy. Then he thought perhaps the mezcal he had been drinking was bad and on its way to blinding him. There was simply no other reason why his heart should feel like it was vibrating. Regardless he kept drinking it. Eventually Sirius came over. That night there was a banjo player in the bar who was joined by a fiddler and everyone was dancing. He and Sirius did not say altogether that many words to one another but it felt like each one chipped away something like resolve inside him leaving behind it a desperate and yearning hollowness. At first he thought they were going outside together just to smoke a bit of hashish but he could taste Sirius’s mouth on the paper when the joint was passed and his knees felt weak. 

He understood it without words. 

That summer there was some glut of evil insects in that country and they screamed and screamed. They ate every rare green thing there was and screamed. They were obliged to be very quiet because if caught they would be hung for sodomy. Sirius’s hand was pressed tightly over his mouth. Against it he sucked in thin breaths. He could hear his own heartbeat slamming in his ears and the endless screaming. The wind, and far away there were coyotes. His body was saying something to him but he couldn’t understand it. It was calling out in another language from very far away.

_Do you recall how nervous he was about it at first_ , sang the angels.

“We won’t see each other again,” he said when it was over. This (Sirius’s come was running down the insides of his thighs, he ached, his heart was full, there was no moon, the rush of overwhelmed gold light had faded from the world, but it had left behind some color, some stain in the corners of things) was wishful. And indeed not long after that it began to be clear there was some cosmic error or else time kept catching in the same groove. 

_He would have done almost anything to keep from hurting you_ , sang the angels, _until you asked_. 

In Santa Fe nine months or so later he had been so livid to see Sirius again because of what it seemed to prove about the very nature of fate that he had wanted to kill him. Instead they wound up upstairs in bed. This too was like fighting, in the manner of much sex when one was eighteen; he let Sirius pin him on his back and watched, gasping breath, as Sirius greased his cock from a well-used tin (a strike of jealousy anchored him, like a railroad spike through the chest) and pressed inside. It hurt with the deliciousness of life and then the hurt blew up into something else which flushed through his blood. Very near the end of it — following a directive from where he could not be certain — he took Sirius’s hand and brought it to his throat. 

Everything solved, including the great mystery at the heart of the world; everything solved like a math problem into sharp, vivid light.

\--

He had had to finish something. Maybe after that it would be possible. But he wasn’t certain what that thing was that would be possible. It was certain that the thing that needed to be finished was a daunting task which incorporated vengeance. He got shot in Crystal Springs and this put a damper on most everything. 

By that time it had been a couple years since the crossroads, as he liked to remember it; it seemed to make sense things might happen at a crossroads; he had had an acquaintance once whose family had come from Haiti and before Haiti from Africa and this friend had spoken highly yet cryptically of crossroads and the sorts of activities which happened there. Anyway it had been a couple years since this crossroads (for if it was not actual it was metaphysical) and he had been thinking that perhaps Sirius was dead because it would have made most things easier. In every town he studied the handbills on the walls of the banks and the railroad stations whilst pretending he was seeking his own likeness. 

He left Crystal Springs and rode out east, still healing. Against all known odds it rained for many days and he got sick enough to fall from his horse in Tonopah on the edge of town in front of the least reputable saloon. By the decree of the angels and the un-gods the man himself was inside drinking mezcal by the fire. 

They went inside to the little room behind the woodstove where some of the girls entertained. One of them was dispatched to fetch the doctor and came back drenched with the unfortunate news that he was too drunk to be of assistance. “Maybe you might’ve come with me,” Sirius told him, “back then, you know, just maybe.” 

It seemed like a long time before he could speak. Something above or inside the roof was moving like a snake in the sand but nobody else seemed to have noticed. He collected his voice into his chest like dropped grains of rice and found it would hardly fit alongside something big which was sitting in there and growing. It made hardly any sound when it came out of him in the approximate degree of: “I can’t.” 

“Well why can’t you?” 

Eventually he fell asleep. He was told in a few days time by one of the girls that he had nearly died in the night, but did not believe this. Sirius did not mention it. The doctor came, drunk, with a salve for him to rub into his chest every night and a little bottle of a patent medicine called paregoric. Both smelled overwhelmingly of camphor. “You’ll like that,” Sirius said of the latter once the doctor had left again. “There’s morphine in it.” 

“How much?” 

“Not really much at all.” 

He had a little and was almost asleep. The rain had stopped days previous and the auspicious cold sun and wind had scoured the badlands of moisture. The dust was blowing in again through the cracks. Outside in the saloon there was a fiddler playing and eventually Remus heard singing and the sounds of dancing. A little bright laughter like broken glass upon the blood-burnished wood floor. Sirius left for a little while and then he came back and built the fire up again. “I have to do something,” Remus told him. Later he reasoned he’d thought it was a dream. 

“What do you have to do?” 

“Long story.” 

“Right.” 

“But then.” 

Sirius turned before the fire. There was an expression on his face that time had rendered dissolute. So often had this expression been called to memory that there was hardly anything left of it now but a suggestion that it had been. It was triangulated, he thought he remembered, between yearning and shock and grief. On the handsome young face it seemed like the conceit of a much older man — like a vision. The light was golden on his face and the skin inside his collar.

“Then what,” Sirius said. 

“Then we’ll see.” 

\--

The poem sung by the angels, which were in the river, and in the sky, and under the earth, which were in the rain, which were in the stone, the bluffs and the arches, which were in every grain of morphine powder and every amber bead of opium, in the smoky dregs in the bottom of every bottle of mezcal, was about the several truths that had come to call, with his provenance and age; old age, for the country, on account he was thirty-seven, by estimation, and looked older, by estimation, which was his own fault: wind, sun, excess, worry lines, so women called them… 

The truths, sung in a round by the angels: 

_Your body (which is a nothingness)_

_His lust for you (which was never more than hollow)_

_Your memory (which is wishful)_

_History (with which you were selfish)_

_Death (which is your first and last and only lover)_

_Lying together in the shack in the gully on the edge of town he stroked your hair from your face and said, now that it’s all over will you tell me what it was, and you told him, well, not verbally…_

\--

The doctor having been seen to no avail he tried a witch. He had known this woman for many years. She lived far and away down the river a few days’ ride into the canyon. When he arrived at sunset she was skinning a chicken out on the bank of the river. Her half-wild dogs were bounding around her like blood-crazed wolves. 

When she had finished they went inside and she found a clay jug of moonshine which had rolled under the bed amongst boxes sealed with lead and wax no doubt containing precious materials, such as amulets, rosaries, bits and pieces of magical flora and fauna, history, photographs, the core of good and evil, et cetera. “It won’t blind you,” she said as she doled out the drink into copitas, which didn’t mean much, because her eyes were growing a cloudy look about them, and she was only thirty. He drank it anyway and found the liquor itself was scouring. “It’ll burn most any evil thing out of you,” she went on. 

“Maybe so.” 

“All it is is a bit of creosote — ”

“ — I don’t, Marlene, don’t really want to know how you make it.” 

She snorted. “Suit yourself,” she said. 

One of Marlene’s dogs had put its head in Remus’s lap. Blood and feathers were sticking around the jowls but its eyes were huge and bright-black and very sad and reflected a distorted echo of Remus’s own face which was something he never cared to see. 

“I have some kind of evil thing,” he told Marlene, petting the dog behind its ears. “Like a visitor.” 

“What sort of visitor.” 

“In the night.” 

“Dreams?” 

“No — I don’t — I can’t tell.” 

She was interested now. She turned away from her cookfire watching with blindish eyes up into the rafters like there might be some sign there. 

“It’s real enough,” he told her. “More than a dream.” 

“When did it start?” 

He took the newspaper clipping from his pocket. He hadn’t showed this to the doctor. He smoothed out the crinkles and folds against the table and passed the paper to Marlene. In the pitchy darkness she was obliged to hold it inches from her nose to read. When she had finished she passed it back. “August,” she said. 

“Tail end of August.” 

“I didn’t hear. News never gets out here unless someone comes to tell me. But I can’t say I’m surprised.” 

“Did you — have a vision or something — ”

“It doesn’t work that way, Lupin.” 

“Then how did you know?” 

“He was never the sort that could be… contained.” 

A chill went up his spine like the touch of cold hands. 

“Neither are you, of course,” Marlene went on. “It would’ve taken you even less time if I do say so.” 

“It can’t be him,” Remus told her, to change the subject. “Not physically.” 

“How do you know that.” 

_Because he leaves_ , Remus didn’t say. 

“It’s possible that he’s studied dark arts,” said Marlene. “But it isn’t probable. To project oneself requires intense discipline… not to mention certain materials which would be very difficult to acquire in prison.” 

“He isn’t in prison anymore. He’s on the run.” 

“These materials are very controlled. Besides he would have needed them in prison, to rehearse. It does not work instantaneously.” 

“Have you ever tried it?” 

“I haven’t dared.” 

She refreshed the moonshine in the copitas. Past her in the open doorway the last of the light was spilling red-gold blood over the river and the canyon. 

“It is possible that he has sent dreams to you or otherwise attempted to influence your thinking. I would consider that more likely. Additionally it could be a brain fever. Have you any other symptoms?” 

“I stop breathing in my sleep.” 

Marlene paused. Even the dogs were silent and the birds and the wind. “Ah,” she said at last. 

They ate the roast chicken and drank moonshine and wine. At last when the moon was high and the dogs were asleep and they were good and drunk Marlene rummaged under the bed and pried open a few of the boxes with a sharp knife. The materials inside were wrapped artfully in cheesecloth sachets. Several of these items were removed into a clay bowl which Marlene brought out to the river and prayed over while Remus had a cigarette and watched. Inside again he fell asleep in the chair by the fire while Marlene incorporated these items into a tea and a thick, oily salve. She had finished with these by dawn when Remus woke with a screaming hangover. 

She explained to him that these were powerful objects for healing and protection. The tea in particular was precious. He should drink one full cup each week in time with the moon’s phases, ideally with goat’s milk and honey, and each night before sleep he should take a few drops. The salve might be used more liberally. Like the stuff he had been given years previous in Tonopah its primary purpose was to ease breathing, but she had added to it certain magical compounds which smoothed sleep and countered evil enchantments. 

When his headache dissolved he rode again upriver. That night before sleep along the trail he took a few drops of the cold tea and applied the salve to his temples and upper chest as instructed. 

The dream came at dawn again but differently. 

\--

They walked together in the snow and eventually it did not feel cold at all. He knew this was a clever and deadly fiction and marched them onward across the scablands. Beside him Sirius stumbled. Can’t we stop, he said, for just a moment, and Remus told him, if we stop we’ll die, it’s that simple, do you want to die? 

In the morning it was all still. The sky came splitting blinding blue out of the red dawn. By the position of the sun they found the Snake River and walked along it until they came upon a town about noon. In a vacant saloon he sat before the fire cleaning his gun for hours while Sirius slept. At dusk he woke him and they walked on again. They had been out in the sharp biting cold for an hour or so when Sirius said, “Where are we going?” 

As had become customary they had run into one another in Yakima. He had taken a room at a boarding house and waited sitting on the edge of the bed wondering whether or not to take off his boots until Sirius climbed in the window. How’s that thing, Sirius had asked, that thing you had to finish? Almost finished, Remus had told him, though this was purely wishful. They lay together in the tiny bed. He had recognized a few months previous while high and introspective that usually he wholeheartedly believed the only thing keeping him alive was vengeance and once the vengeance had been accomplished he would just keel over and die. He believed this in every moment except those when he was with Sirius. 

I’m going now to finish it, he had told Sirius then. I’m going to Idaho to finish it. Sirius had said, well I’ll come with you. And he had not refused. 

“We’re going to a place called White Bird,” Remus told him as they walked along the river. 

“Why?” 

“There’s someone who lives there.” 

“Who lives there?” 

Some evil person from long ago. One of many devils on this earth by experience and approximation. The last who required to be counted among the dead before the door might be shut and locked forever. He returned however to the time-honored cliche: “Someone who has something of mine.” 

“What is it?” 

“That’s enough questions.” 

He didn’t know really why he didn’t want to say it. In the literal sense it was just money, but also something more amorphous like dignity which didn’t necessarily need to be mentioned. 

“You asked me to come with you — ”

“ — you invited yourself.” 

They didn’t speak again. He thought Sirius might leave but he did not. He told Remus later this was because he hadn’t known the way out of the maze of that country and they did not have a map. 

The way the hills were, the sharp brown-black cliffs of toppling stone sharp against the bright early-spring green, made the country seem like the seat of some fallen civilization whose wreckage was all about and crumbling. He mentioned this to Sirius who reminded him it had indeed been the seat of several great civilizations who had been forcibly displaced. They didn’t speak again. They walked in the silent valleys day and night catching sleep when they could and when at last they came to White Bird the entire affair was a profound anticlimax. 

He wept by the Salmon River cleaning himself of blood. He thought he was surreptitious about it but apparently he wasn’t. Sirius was collecting the horses who had scattered in the gunfire and when he had got them he came down and embraced Remus and held him which he wanted to hate but didn’t and the horses drank from the cold water and wandered further south along the banks dragging their fine leather ropes among the rounded grey stones. 

\--

There was no visitor. He lay awake with eyes closed in the bedroll for a while listening to the river until it became clear none was coming. He packed up his camp again and saddled his pony and rode onward. 

In the early morning there was no haze. The canyon tightened into a cold embrace which echoed the sound of the river and his surefooted horse upon the crust of living earth. The chill of the fading night was still in the thick blue-black shadow like the hurt in an old bruise. And the odd bird sang. The wind rustled hushingly from the west rattling the stiff leaves and spines of the scant vegetation — mesquite, ocotillo, sotol, ceanothus — with a smell sharp as coming snow. 

Wind and water had shaped the canyon over inconceivable years, or so a survey geologist had explained in the saloon when Remus had first come to town. When he had left the establishment later that night the geologist’s heated debate with the son of the local Catholic minister seemed to have turned physical. Fisticuffs were being exchanged in the dark street. Drunk, Remus left them to it and went down to the river. At that time it had seemed easier to believe in God in spite of everything than to believe that there had been so many years. Since then he had begun to understand what could be un-shaped by time. 

_Conviction_ , sang the angels, with the wind, _the form of truth, certainty, hatred, fact, love, color, light —_

The stone was slick red, smooth and color-imperfect as skin, bleeding black patina, exuding cold. Like a breath. High in the canyon wall the windblown sand had cut out strange windows capturing the sky inside themselves like jewels. Legend told that the malpais shifted shape in the night. The slot canyons ended in low wind-rounded fishbowls dripping patina and alien flora where days previous a path had run through to whatever vestige of civilization. The river had been known to flow any number of ways and to slip its mapping like an animal with a troublesome yoke. Somewhere in the canyon a drunkard in the saloon claimed to have seen cloven hoofprints among the rock and elsewhere another drunkard claimed to have seen the devil. Remus himself had seen any number of things while influenced by drugs or drink or grief or any similar psychoactive compound — alien birds, lost cities, the earth moving, deceased acquaintances, the jetsam of lost wagontrains, bones, laughter, music, gunfire, thunder out of an empty sky… 

There was no time here. It was pushed up by some hand from below shifting slipping into itself and shoved up again and sculpted into devilish maze-shapes by unseen gods. 

\--

They rode to Boise where they redeemed the ten thousand dollar bounty they had gathered in White Bird. With the money and nothing else to do they went to live along the Snake River. The spring came slowly; there was ice like lace among the smooth stones on the banks of the river in the early mornings until June. They fought often and fucked often in lieu of fighting or sometimes in apology. In September an old friend of Sirius’s came calling with a job and he went. This job spawned others. Eventually Remus went too. 

He thought sometimes of Sirius when they were apart and was laid low. He lay alone in the bedroll in the cold tortured by his loneliness and the weakness this seemed to imply. He rode back to Seattle and down the coast. Amidst the cold rain-blowing wind he watched Mount St. Helens cough up ash into the black winter sky. 

Telegrams were exchanged. Messages were left with hostlers and bartenders and drug smugglers and prostitutes and assayers and grocers across the territories containing clever codes. He did not think of Sirius as his lover. This seemed some profound limitation of language for there was no word for it that seemed appropriate, though of course they were in part lovers. On occasion they had moments alone to spare and coupled frantically in alleys and darkened rooms and canvas tents and lean-tos on the desert. On other occasions it felt as though they made love for days. He woke from the cavernous black recesses of exhausted dreamless sleep like a psychedelic trip to find this other body with him in the bed a tremendous and priceless gift which was perpetually fleeting. The profound desperation of longing (which distance and time compounded) cowed him and he served its most abject wishes. 

They made love in the dirt in the pounding summer rain beating the parched soil like a drum, and he felt without words that the very earth had opened itself the way he had for this long-awaited touch. On the coldest winter nights beneath the sweltering bearskin Sirius fucked teasingly between his thighs, hand at his belly, holding him still, lips parted at his ear, whispering nonsense. He woke Remus up in the mornings with a wet blowjob or his tongue inside him; consciousness arrived slowly, treacly out of the blur and burn of dreams and pleasure; he wasn’t sure of the beginnings or endings of his own body, or really of anything, shifting against the mattress and the tangled blankets, against the insistent seeking touch; his body moved of his own accord or otherwise where Sirius directed, and he ached for this when it was absent, for the strange care, for the sense of surrender, which was something he had never dared show anybody before: how badly he wanted, and the things he wanted, the pretty and unpretty things, things sometimes that almost hurt; it hardly felt like he was telling another person, because like this they did not seem so very separate, not their bodies, nor their souls… 

It returned as ever to the act at the crux of their shared desire: long, slow, burning fucking, deep, wet, nighttime, the crickets singing, coyotes, lightning sometimes, watching one another’s eyes and open mouths for signs, culminated, consummated, elevated at the last to something like the conceit of obscure and vengeful gods by the pressure of Sirius’s hand around his throat. 

These sojourns never lasted very long. 

\--

He too had powerful items in boxes under the bed. They were letters and things from long ago. Among them was a tintype photograph and a pressed flower. A scrap of fabric which had been picked at by moths. A missive attempting intimidation and blackmail and another floridly begging forgiveness (both from Sirius). An empty brown glass vial formerly containing laudanum. Maps, newspaper clippings, a child’s illustration, notes on the names of places and things, a page of a calendar from a June ten years previous… 

He lay the pieces out on the floor like squares for a quilt seeking the pattern that would show how things must be joined. At last he took the clipping from his pocket he had carried around with him since the very day and made space for it amidst the jetsam: 

_KILLER PINKERTON AGENT ESCAPED FROM ALCATRAZ_

It had been somewhat less surprising and clearly less newsworthy (it had appeared on the third page of the Green River paper) than the news of Sirius’s arrest, which had been emblazoned across the front of the weekly rag in Missoula, Montana. Apparently the entire story of the identification, pursuit, and capture of a private detective gone rogue in the Californian goldfields had been covered rabidly in the press across the West; Remus hadn’t seen the stories because he’d been riding out in the Bitterroots on a long job. The cut from this job had been pretty much immediately spent boozing until he found himself run out of town. When he again failed to kill himself with alcohol, this time in Butte, he rode straight south, assuming the desert would do it. After all it had tried to kill him any number of times before and he had only evaded this through sheer luck and will to live. He figured without either there was only a ghost of a chance he would make it to the Colorado. 

For a while he had meditated on it, drying out, suffering in the cold sun. On how it might have been possible that he had not noticed these untoward allegiances given that he had known this man for a decade, lived with him, run jobs with him, shared his food and drink, his bed, his money, the pastorality of love, the sublimity of sex; this person was inside him always beyond the literal, and in his dreams… This person who had waited with him dying in the room behind the fire in Tonopah and who had nearly froze to death with him in the scablands like lost children out of fable. By the time he reached the Mormon settlement at Provo and skirted it in the night hugging the long sharp spine of the mountains he had discovered within his memory the pattern which indicated he had been used. He took the pass along the Spanish Fork to cut southeast across the high plain where nothing was. In a week’s time he had crossed the San Rafael Reef and met up with the Old Spanish Trail where it crossed the cold river turgid-brown with snowmelt raging through the long red canyon. They had never been in this place together. He thought about bashing his brains out with a stone. 

_How is it that you might always be with me when you’re gone_ , Sirius had written. The letter was dated December 3 1871 and addressed to Remus in Boise in the perfect spidery hand. Sirius had learned to read and write from nuns in childhood in Boston and he was prone to poetics. _I have fallen asleep in the saddle on occasion I will admit and seen you riding beside me on that big black horse you had years ago clear as day as though you were really there. I wonder if you will come to Oregon — to Baker City at the end of January. I miss the sight of you and else besides with a powerful desperation._

He had gone to Baker City, he remembered; Sirius hadn’t shown up until halfway through February. The town was possessed by the jetsam of floundering wagontrains wintering on the outskirts until the country might thaw enough to allow them passage over the desert and the Cascades. There was one woman around Remus’s age who got dead drunk every night in the saloon on account of she’d lost her husband and her unborn child to unmarked graves somewhere in Wyoming. She had asked him who he was waiting for and he told her. “A man.” 

“A bad man?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“But your man.” 

He hadn’t been sure what to say to her, so he said nothing at all. 

“You wouldn’t wait for him this long if he weren’t your man,” she said. 

His own letters to Sirius were very short, and they looked like hell because he couldn’t write joined together. They just looked like grocery lists, Sirius said sometimes. There were a few of them in with the papers from ’69, ’70. They were addressed to Sirius at locales from Seattle to Houston. 

_I’ll be in Vegas middle of September._

_In Phoenix. Job’s done. It rained tonight. Coming north to Elko by April 1. Hope I see you_. 

In Baker City he put Sirius’s coat on and went out in the snow to have a cigarette. Inside the drunk woman was asleep at the bar. He’d witnessed on previous nights the proceedings when her sister came to fetch her. There was a piece of paper in the pocket of Sirius’s coat — soft and crinkled from being worried at — and he took it out and smoothed it. It was the silliest of his letters. He remembered dimly having written it in Fresno after having left Tonopah in the night without saying goodbye. He had been taking the panegyric for his lingering cough and when it ran out the chemist in Bishop had just given him laudanum. It was under this influence that he had written the letter. 

_I am dearly sorry for having left. I care for you absolutely and I meant those things I said to you. I want you to know you are the only person who has ever taken such care with me. It makes me entirely unsure how to behave. I’ve gone and cocked it up now I’m sure. But I know I will see you again._

He went inside and upstairs and lay down with Sirius who was asleep in the bed. Didn’t sleep again. It had always been easiest for him to process information suggesting perhaps he was impossible to love. 

A note Sirius had left on the table for him at the cottage along the Snake River, summer, they were only twenty-one, he couldn’t remember for the life of him why he’d saved it: _Gone to see about the trout. If you go to town we need tea and bacon_. They had been fighting the night before, he thought he remembered. There was ice on the river in the morning. When he came back from town with the supplies he went down to find Sirius who had hauled up three trout into a bucket. He was watching at the sky where above a black bird wheeled. “The water’s damn cold,” he said. “What do you think that is?” 

“Hawk or something.” 

They went back up to the house. He drew water in from the well and cleaned the fish and Sirius made cornbread which was the only thing he could make which was edible. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, not looking at Remus across the table. 

“Whatever are you sorry for.” 

“Last night.”

“You didn’t do anything to be sorry for.” 

They met eyes across the fish guts. 

“It’s my fault,” Remus told him. 

“No it isn’t — ” 

“Stop. You don’t have to. Yes it is. It’s alright.” 

They didn’t speak for a while. Slowly he slit the belly of the last trout open watching the fine opalescent skin tear along the fine line of his knife. 

“It makes me feel like you don’t trust me,” Sirius said finally. It was nearly dark in the window. 

“I do trust you.” 

“You’ve a funny way of — but let’s not fight about it again.” 

“Let’s not,” Remus agreed. 

They cooked the fish and the cornbread in separate cast irons over the fire. They ate in silence and afterward he went outside to scrub the pans out with sand. The night was frigid and still and wild with stars but moonless. Far away down the canyon there were coyotes and bats calling to one another. Sirius came out and embraced him and put his nose in his ear. 

He had always imagined falling from the rim of a canyon you would never know not-falling for all your death. Death would be a falling off the edge of consciousness falling and falling into eternity. He stood at the brink: Arizona, winter. The color with untold names vivid sharp against the snow and the end of the day. That country such a vision of sublime horror that each night it seemed uncertain the sun would rise again. Beneath his boots a few pebbles slipped over the steep escarpment into infinity. Almost inconceivably far below the river which at one time had rent the skin of this very earth like cloth into a riot of deep bloody endless wounds was but a ghost of shadow. 

They went inside together. He undressed and lay naked on the bearskin feeling like an expensive whore or a sacrificial animal. “How can you say I don’t trust you,” he said. 

Sirius sat beside him on the bed still in his long underwear. The solemn intensity of his regard in these circumstances felt on occasion like a loaded gun pressed to Remus’s temple. “I said sometimes it feels like you don’t trust me.” 

“I trust you. I trust you more than anyone. I trust you with my life. I trust you with everything.” 

“You don’t trust me with everything,” Sirius reminded him. His palm rested high on Remus’s belly. His hands were always cold. “Not at all.” 

“I trust you with all the important things.” 

“Do you really.” 

“Yes.” He swallowed. Sirius watched his throat. The frission of apprehension or certainty passed along his spine through his entire skin, his entire blood. “Do you trust me?” 

“Of course.” 

“Liar.” 

“Stop it. For God’s sake. I thought you didn’t want to fight about it again.” 

“I don’t,” Remus told him. “You know what I want.” 

“Do I.” 

“Yes.” 

The kiss they shared, vengeful, cauterizing, sealed for at least another fortnight this topic of conversation. They slept in a tangle of one another’s limbs. In the morning he woke first and built the fire back up and cleaned himself with fresh water from the well and made coffee and biscuits and bacon and then he climbed back in bed and tangled himself up again with Sirius. 

So this was why he had saved the note. His foot was asleep. He found another: _I waited for you in Reno for days whilst I drank and gambled my entire cut from the Tahoe job. I thought you’d let that all go by now but I was mistaken. For myself I can only convey to you my sincerest apologies again and remind you that I have forgiven you for your every indiscretion since first we met including nearly getting us both killed on numerous occasions and doing grave injury to my spirit. It is clear to me now that there is nothing for which I would not forgive you including my own death if it were your fault which I do not doubt it will be. From the core of my soul I am sincerely yours. I will be here in the Lodestone Inn until November at least if there is any similar feeling in your own heart. Sirius Black Yuba City CA August 12 1877._

It was the last message he had received, in Great Falls Montana, before the Bitterroot job, before the reckoning. 

At first he had tried to remember what he had told Sirius and as such what he had betrayed. He had made a list, which was in with the papers too. The cash buried at the foot of the volcano in Snow Canyon, the particulars of the drug-running route between Denver and Santa Fe, names of suppliers and manufacturers and crooked chemists and patent medicine salesmen, brothel madams who dabbled in the trafficking of opium and high-proof whiskey, mezcaleros and mezcaleras who dabbled in the trafficking of peyote and other hallucinogenic flora and compounds, witches like Marlene who dabbled in the trafficking of magical items as well as hallucinogenic flora and compounds, the way through the woods between Ellensburg and Seattle, the way through the woods between Bishop and Fresno, the way through the woods between Lake Tahoe and Placerville, the way across the desert between Elko and Ely, the way across the scablands in Eastern Washington, the way through the deep gorges of the Columbia and the Colorado and the Gunnison and the Snake and the Flathead and the Green and the Rio Grande, the codes men showed each other in the Phoenix saloons, and what had happened in 1865 in Trinidad Colorado… 

All this and all the rest gone now the way of the Eastern territories toward the un-law of industry, which preceded and neglected any natural law and was more ruthless. His every love- or trust-confession had gone toward the final bridling of this as any land for ambitious men’s ends. Like any good vulture Sirius had found a good vein and mined it until it ran dry. Until the truth ran dry and else besides — until whatever compulsion of love had run out with it like the last trickle of snowmelt in the wide dry washes. 

And yet Sirius of course had told him things too. There were some which were easy to forget and others, like the cornbread recipe, which were easily massaged into other memories like puzzle pieces which almost fit. There were others, like the very route of the Old Spanish Trail, like a few words of Navajo and Numu and Basque and German, how to read a topographic map, unnecessarily pretty synonyms, a few lines of poetry, that elsewhere like for example in France men like them could live together with no fear of recourse, the names of railroad men and the deputies of their security details, of newspapermen, bankers, sheriffs, marshals, mayors, senators, those among these who were crooked and those who were straight, those who might be fooled, those who might accept a bribe, those who might be (e.g. had been) seduced, the names of chiefs and would-be chiefs of Indian nations and those gifts which were appropriate, the true identities and appearances of notorious highwaymen and outlaws, famous gamblers who were really as good as they said they were and famous gamblers who weren’t, the codes men showed each other in Chicago blues clubs, the sound of Chicago blues, the hurt which could be at the core of music, how to burn out a bullet wound with gunpowder and how to cauterize other sorts of wounds with the hot barrel of one’s gun, how to keep oneself up all night with a potent tea brewed from jointfir, how to forgive someone who did not deserve it for the peace of one’s own mind, the best place to cross the border into Mexico with contraband, how to develop a tintype photograph… 

At last he went out to the well for water and found by the angle of the stars against the moon it was midnight. It was likely there would be frost on the ground in the morning. The blue alien light against the river and the canyon cast shades of the other world which sometimes touched this one. 

When he went in he sat on the edge of the bed for a while pondering the supplies Marlene had given him. He had made a batch of the tea and put it in a covered jar beside the bed for administering nightly as she had instructed and yet he wondered now if such a treatment was necessary. At last he opened the salve and put his finger in it but eventually he wiped this off against his thigh and put the gaslight out and lay down. The moon had moved into the window and the draft was coming in under the pane as an actualization of its cold cottony light. 

He recalled a letter he had sent to Sirius years ago, before Tonopah, before White Bird, before Boise, before it all, if there was ever any time before it all, if it had not all unfolded previously and would not again, if it was not still happening now, if it would not go on and on until the end of the world; he was drunk off his head in the worst saloon in town, eighteen, maybe nineteen, Taos, thinking and hating himself for thinking, let that man come and do what he wants, whatever he wants, it’s what I want: 

_Will be here another month at least. I ain’t afraid of this or you. Remains to be seen if you’re afraid of this or me. Though I’ve no proof I trust you ain’t. You don’t seem the type to be afraid of fate._

Perhaps this missive too was with Sirius now wherever he might be. Perhaps he understood it remained true. Behind his closed eyes the apparition turned into darkness. He thought he dreamed about the deep red canyon. They camped in the night by a pool of rainwater that had fallen thousands of years previous and leached through the rock over untold eons. 

\--

He woke at dawn alone in the bed breathing, watching the door for a sign. Nothing came but the wind underneath and after twenty minutes or so he got up, lightheaded with disappointment. Some of the fever was with him as a thickness in his heart and throat, and he wondered if perhaps he had experienced some vision and forgotten it before waking. He went outside for water and to clear his head and found there was a delicate rime of snow like ash or bone-dust in the canyon. A fine webbing of ice among the smooth rounded stones in the shallows of the sluggish winter river as there had been in the mornings in the bygone days on a different darker colder river rolling through the black cliffs toward the northward forest. 

Memory was its own potent psychedelic which blindsided him with heavy color and light and certainty. He felt without seeing the apparition with him again differently than the times before. He walked past the well and along the riverbank listening into the sounds of the wind and water for some other voice. Eventually he realized it would not speak until he did. He said aloud, “Did you keep my letters?” 

The angels (like rivermaidens out of Wagner) sang an old song into the bitter stillness. The stone misshaped the words until at last in that other voice the echo returned to him out of time itself as a lone dark figure limping in the road. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you as always to emily for license to do something wild.


End file.
